


Nest

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: s01e01 A Study in Pink, Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall, return/reunion, what binds, what grows, what recedes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2012-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-22 00:11:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/603612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While you were gone the pigeons lined their nests with your memory, little hairs stolen here, there, under their bridge-born nestlings; sparrows lifting and nicking and tweaking the bespoke threads of your suits…</p>
<p>Before his eye drops like a door John thinks he's never noticed another man's lashes before.</p>
<p>Prompt: Hair</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nest

**Author's Note:**

> Title inspired by Anna Journey's [If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0820333689/ref=rdr_ext_tmb)

**_Recession_**  
  
His hairline is drifting up with the sands.  In the desert one thinks about borders, lines in the grit that might mean one death or another, but not this, this trivial thing, looking in a chipped mirror hung on a tent-post and seeing the greying line up another few centimetres with every soul, maybe, every one he can’t keep from the sad reports of the sitting magpie, the recitation of the dead.

A line of _Myrmica afghanica_.  A march.

 He’s heard the local people say that shaving a baby’s hair will make it grow back thicker.  
  
It's not something he really thinks about.  Six months later a hand at his hairline pulls him from a fever-dream, pulls him from the conglomerate sediments of the Helmand, spins the line that zips him back to the cold wild.  
  
He goes back to London listless, all sadlines and limp.  
  
 ** _Lash_**  
  
“John Watson,” Mike Stamford says. Mike's balder now, heavier; they were slack-jumpered students once, watching  cataracts over the shoulders of the girls, hoping in the pubs to sink their hands…“John, “ Mike says, “old friend.”  He _feels_ old until Sherlock blinks at him from under what is not a fringe but a shadow, tugs him briefly out of himself with a filament of smile.  John's never noticed; he’s never... hears him saying something about riding and thinks _whip, quick as a_ …

Before his eye drops like a door John thinks he's never noticed another man's lashes before.  
  
Before he knows it he's at Baker Street, marvelling at a stripped skull and a stack of bones and in the sink that first night a single dark hair in a white oasis and no memory of the desert at all.

**_Evidence_**  
  
Sherlock is looking at fibres under the microscope.

 “Horse,” he says, “not human.”                        

“ _You're_ not human,” John says, but it's wry, affectionate, not yet angry.  He scrubs a hand over his scalp, peers into the ocular himself at the spinous scales of bat and mink.

It's been a long time since he’s been transported, a galaxy in a fine line; solve the crimes and come home; come home stretched thin and strong as paired…

“Here,” Sherlock says, plucks a single hair from his head, brush-mines one from John’s shoulders. “Look.”

Cuticle cortex medulla; two filaments, lit from within; the flat spun close.

Later the bow, taut, the hair-shucked notes and the wire in the blood.

**_Effluvium_**  
  
It is three years. It is not romantic, not as romantic as it sounds to have another man's hair stranded in there; in a box, first with medals and mementoes, and then alone.

Six months after the suicide John sheds and sheds; then it grows back ginger, then silver; then he smiles a few times and never stops waiting while the follicles brood in the sebaceous dark.

It’s not romantic. It’s a cascade in a locked box.  A sorrow of a lock.  
  
 ** _Nest_**

The last time he put his hands scaphoid-deep in someone’s hair they came away red. They don’t this time but it’s close; they might have done.  
  
He puts his hands into that which is somehow just the same only quicker, mercury there, and tugs it clear, pulls it aside, touches the old scalp wound with his fingers.

_While you were gone the pigeons lined their nests with your memory, hairs stolen here, there, under their bridge-born nestlings; sparrows lifting and nicking and tweaking the bespoke threads of your suits, your shirts, your twists and tricks twined through the city warming and crackling. They built it without you, with you, for you; the nests, the triggers of wood, the bridges, the hideouts, the weapons, everything you’d need._  
  
It was this that brought you home. A scar. A lift at the hairline. It was this that brought you home: Twinings. Nestings. Hatchings. Clues.  
  
 ** _Halo_**  
  
Donovan has the most beautiful hair, Lestrade thinks, and then he catches himself because he’s never once thought that way about her, his protégé, but she’s beautiful; of course she is and he’s never been happier.  Look at them bent over a body. Look at the sun shining on the heads of his detectives.  The doctor and his detective. Their city.    
  
Later there will be fibres, cells, things they will never find a trace of; things you can’t quantify; a wink, a cowlick.  Now the sun’s shining on the hello-winter of the birds, the bodies, the inspectors. Look at them there, heads bent (wild, flattening-in-the-wind dark; nothing-to-blow grey) over the dead.  Look at them kneeling in the light.  Look at them there; just look at them.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Sherlock: masc. proper name, lit. "fair-haired," from O.E. scir "bright" + locc "lock of hair."
> 
>  [Two intertwined human hairs under microscope](http://www.microbehunter.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/hair_1.jpg)
> 
>    
> [Myrmica afghanica](http://www.antweb.org/description.do?genus=myrmica&name=afghanica&rank=species)
> 
>    
> “…I pretend  
> I don’t know the reality  
> Of sheep-gut, cat-gut strings or gazelles  
> stretched over drumheads. Horsehair wiring out  
> the violin’s voice…”—Anna Journey, “Apparition with Toenail Music.”
> 
> Thank you to [Songster](http://songstersmiscellany.tumblr.com/post/38374007309/sketching-hooded-crows-kikis-delivery-service) for the music and the crows, [AfroGeekGoddess](http://archiveofourown.org/works/590500) for your winter cardinal,[BlackMorgan](http://archiveofourown.org/works/590770) for your phoebe; [Moranion, I think you like hair](http://archiveofourown.org/works/318877); and to Professorfangirl, for the nests and the napes and so many other things.
> 
> Hello-winter to all.


End file.
